At 91, dad asks, “Why isn’t anybody protesting?”

Baba turned 91 last week. I went to Mumbai from Bangalore to wish him and to perform our quarterly ritual of taking both to the family physician. This time dad fared better than mom. Her blockages in leg arteries are worsening, making it difficult for her to sleep. However, I am accustomed to situations where we ask, “How will they manage by themselves?” And yet they do, valuing their independence more than anything else.

Baba doesn’t do much these days. He is mostly on his bed, occasionally getting up to eat and visit the toilet. He ventures out once in a few months for a haircut, or to visit the doctor or his brother, or sister. He is still addicted to the newspaper, though – Loksatta if he is in Mumbai and The Hindu if he is in Bangalore with us. He also reads two magazines with a socialist leaning – Sadhana and Maha Anubhav. After he is done with reading the news, he has asked me many times, “Why is nobody protesting?” I don’t know the answer. I can only ask, “Why am I not protesting?”

Baba tells me that he has seen the rise of fascism in India since the 60s, before I was born. He worked at the Indian Cotton Mills Federation, perhaps the NASSCOM of textile industry, influencing the policy makers on behalf of the industry. He feels that the murder of Krishna Desai, a Communist Party leader, the then MLA, and a leader of mill workers’ union in 1970 was a turning point in the rise of fascism in Maharashtra. Three Shiv Sena party members were convicted and spent seven years in prison. Baba feels that a few textile oligarchs funded the assassination, and the then Congress Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik made money in the process. Barely three weeks after Desai’s death, Shiva Sena founder Bal Thackeray has said, “We must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists wherever we find them."¹

The rise of fascism had its reflection in society. Vijay Tendulkar wrote the now-famous play “Ghashiram Kotwal” (1972) on the corrupt police chief of Pune serving the corrupt chief secretary Nana Phadanavis during the Peshwa dynasty in the 18^th century. I watched Ghashiram and read George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four while in school. Bombay gang wars also had their share of representation in the newspapers. I was in the 6^th grade when Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Shabir Kaskar was killed by Manya Surve at a petrol pump near our flat in Prabhadevi in 1981. Next year, Surve was killed in a police encounter, also remembered as Bombay’s first encounter killing. It provided masala to two Bollywood films – Amitabh starrer Agneepath and Shootout at Wadala. One of my school classmates joined the Rama Naik gang and one became a police inspector. I was too shy, skinny, and underweight to go towards either of the paths. However, I became aware of the brutal power of “the system,” which included mafia as a core element and the doctrine of “winning at any cost”. I was not convinced that protests could make a dent in such a powerful system.

As I flew from Buffalo, New York, to Bombay (now Mumbai) via perhaps Heathrow in December 1992, I watched the demolition of Babri Masjid telecast all over. I didn’t know that it would go down in history as the event that broke the secular backbone of India. When I landed in Bombay, the city was standstill and still burning. Riots that followed within a month changed the city forever. A few years later, our friend Iqbal narrated to us in Buffalo how his family literally ran from their house in Worli, not too far from our place.

But the event that saddened Baba the most was the assassination of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013. Our last name sake, he was a social activist, rationalist, and writer involved in the eradication of superstition in Maharashtra. Baba could visualize then how “the system” is going to capture India. Dabholkar’s assassination would be followed by Pansare (2015), Kalburgi (2015), and Gauri Lankesh (2017). CBI called these murders “a pre-planned act of terror”. Last year, eleven years later, two shooters got life imprisonment while the masterminds remain at large. People protested for some time and then stopped. I didn’t join any protests, didn’t even consider it. Why not? What were my biases?

I strongly felt that to navigate a crazy system, brute force doesn’t work. Shouting out can be detrimental. It is a miracle that Julian Assange survived five years in jail. What appealed to me the most is what I wrote about more than a decade ago in the backdrop of Anna Hazare-Kiran Bedi protests – the wisdom from “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” – the first step is to be invisible. This is what Rana Ayyub did for eight months, God only knows how, before she could write Gujrat Files. And, unfortunately, this is what Hemant Karkare, the then head of Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) couldn’t do as he began exposing the perpetrators of 2008 Malgaon bomb blasts. He was crushed by “the system” on the same day as 26/11 attacks and in a sophisticated manner, putting the blame on Pakistani terrorists².

My lack of enthusiasm for protests has another side. Protests assume (mostly, not always) that the world is “fixable”, like how we fix a car or a broken hip bone. What if it is more like cloud-fixing as opposed to clock-fixing? Mindfulness suggests that “fixing” the world can be a dangerous addiction. It is just an expression of the innate desire to mould the world to feel secure in an inherently insecure world. Sustained narrative to fix the world calcifies the belief that the world exists independent of me. What if it is not? If everything is indeed interconnected, and hence Sunya as Nagarjuna suggests, then seeing the sunyata (emptiness) must be primary. Without this insight, I carry hatred/anger against the bad world, sometimes deeply buried within. The society appears to be like a plumbing system to be fixed when things don’t flow in a desired way. And, insight can’t be engineered, either by protests or by force or by meditation, at least not yet.

My lack of belief in the power of protests has begun to shift recently. Protests against the ongoing wars, the proxy-war against Russia and the Israel-Palestine war looked pale initially and easily suppressible. However, in the past year or so the power of protests has surprised me. I also found the work done by Whitney Webb (One nation under blackmail vol 1 & 2), Lina Khan (Amazon’s antitrust paradox), and Francesca Albanese (From economy of occupation to economy of genocide) totally impressive in exposing the nexus between oligarchs, politicians, intelligence, and organized crime. I also admire the work of Indian YouTubers like Shyam Meera Singh, Kavya Karnatac, Mohak Mangal, Kunal Kamra, and Sheeba Fehmi in raising awareness on various aspects of the Deep State in India.

In March 1993, a few months after the Babri debacle, Vijay Tendulkar wrote a short fictional piece on Ghashiram Kotwal. In his dream, while traveling in Deccan Queen, Tendulkar meets Ghashiram in jeans and T-shirt. Ghashiram shows him his diary which, like Epstein’s black book, contains the names of top politicians and industrialists in India and beyond and tells him, “The entire democracy in this country is standing on the black money, top class weapons, and unpatriotic people like me. The Ghashiram in your play is running the country.” Two decades later Ghashiram’s clout has grown stronger. In 2025, India is ranked 151^st out of 180 countries in World press freedom index ranking.

Sources:

1.  “Nativism in a metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay”, Dipankar Gupta, Manohar, 1982, pg 159.

2. "Who killed Karkare? The real face of terrorism in India," S. M. Mushrif, Former I.G. Police, Maharashtra, Pharos Media, 2023  

Image source: oneindia.com